Beat the Business of Stress

See how one reader is beating the business of stress with an Ecuador tour business.

This is a paid ad for an Ecuador tour that you may want to attend.

RETREAT ON THE EQUATOR HELPS ATTENDEES FIND LIFE BALANCE

Above the clouds at Cheryl Reed’s farm

Cheryl Reed.

Above the Cloud, Retreats offers a week-long sabbatical in the subtropics of Ecuador to help participants explore their passions, cultivate inner joy and achieve greater life balance.

Above the Clouds Retreats has opened registration for their first week-long sabbatical September 15-23, 2012 to be held directly on the equator at the El Encanto Resort in Los Bancos, Ecuador.

El Encanto Resort.

“What better place could there be?,” asks retreat founder and co-leader, Cheryl Reed, “to learn about balance than astride the middle of the world?”

Fifteen years ago, it was Cheryl’s own search for balance that led her to the subtropics of Ecuador for the first time. A physical therapist by trade, she responded to a period of discontent and questioning in her own life by choosing to get away and give to others. She enlisted in a two-week trip to Quito, Ecuador where she volunteered assisting disabled children. And for all the care she gave, she got much more in return.

“After witnessing the poverty in Ecuador and the feeling I had inside from helping others, nothing made sense to me anymore, especially my materialistic life-style” said Reed. Moved by this experience and by her deeply felt connection to Ecuador, Reed soon purchased a 24-acre farm there.

View from Cheryl’s farm.

Splitting her time between the United States and Ecuador, she continued practicing physical therapy in the U.S., and learned to grow coffee on the equator. As she found greater balance in her own life, and recognized the sources of her own true joy, the desire grew in Reed to share these insights with others. Above the Clouds Retreats was founded.

“In a world that is too often filled with more obligations than free-time, it can be difficult for anyone to discover the activities that bring true happiness,” Reed says. “Life tends to sweep us along and we don’t take the time to learn what truly feeds our soul. Attending Above the Clouds Retreats is about giving yourself the gift of time in order to truly listen.”

To facilitate this reflection for her participants, Reed has designed the retreat activities to include guided meditations, labyrinth walks, and personal journaling with an end-goal of helping attendees formulate a concrete plan of action for integrating their insights back into their daily lives. Time for reflection will be balanced with adventure, including treks to secluded waterfalls and flying on zip-lines through the rain forest – activities designed to reinforce and ignite participants’ beliefs that they can and will achieve their dreams. Regina Rivers, a meditative writing instructor, relationship coach and owner of Rivers Healing Arts in Pittsburgh, PA will be co-leading the retreat with Reed.

Zip line through the forest.

The retreat is scheduled for September 15th – 23rd, 2012, and is being held at the El Encanto Resort located two hours from the capital city of Quito. The resort is situated on 326 acres of lush, cloud forest reserve where one square kilometer contains more bio-diversity than in all of the U.S. and Canada combined. Between retreat activities, attendees can enjoy the swimming pool, Jacuzzi and Turkish sauna.

Waterfall in Los Bancos.

The price of the retreat is $1899 which includes all retreat activities, hotel, ground transportation and meals. Participants are responsible for airfare to Ecuador. Early-bird registration, with a discount of $100, is available through July 30th.

Above the Clouds Retreats was founded by Cheryl Reed in order to share with others the riches she has discovered – both the riches and beauty of the subtropics of Ecuador, but more importantly, the riches and beauty that come from living a life in alignment with your deepest desires. Reed is a certified Passion Test facilitator and Happy for No Reason Teacher, as well as a physical therapist, coffee farmer, and author. She donates 10% of retreat profits to Project One Corner, which funds educational costs for underprivileged children in Ecuador.

**A discount of $300 will be provided for those not wanting to include the Otavalo portion of the trip. Please contact Cheryl for complete pricing details.

End of advertisement

Anything one can do to reduce stress is good and a retreat like this can do a lot of good. Any tour business that eliminates stress is really important in in a growth industry during these times of rapid change.

According to a report by American Psychological Association (APA), one third of Americans live with extreme stress and 48 percent believe that their stress has increased over five years.

Money and work are the leading causes of stress 75% of Americans and as the global economy stagnates this problem grows worse. The housing collapse caused 51% of Americans an additional source of stress.

Learn how to earn extra in a tour business below.

Online Earn With a Seminar & Tours Business Course

Learn how to earn extra income from a seminar, tour, exhibition or events business.

Delegates at a recent writer’s camp… one of the events we conduct at our North Carolina seminar center.

Many readers of this site crave freedom… and perhaps adventure. At least they desire the ability to get out of the rat race. They want to travel… spend time… live… laugh or love in more than just one place… and they want the places to be ones they choose.

How can one live such a lifestyle… where a suitcase is a necessary and vital friend?

There are few people more capable of answering this question than… Merri and me.

For 44 years (from May 1968) we have been paid to travel and live exactly where we have wanted to be… because we have had an events business conducting seminars, courses and tours.

Our seminar/conference/ events business has allowed us to visit and to live almost anywhere we have chosen… or not.

Sometimes we have incredible adventures.

Here I am with Merri and an Ecuadorian Yatchak deep in the Llanganatis jungle creating a shamanic tour.

However when we want to stay at home we can also do so. One does not have to travel to have an events business.

Here I am (in brown shirt) speaking to a delegate that we conducted at our Florida home.

We even built a…

seminar hall on Little Horse Creek so we can stay in the mountains when we desire… and still conduct events.

Here is one of the small groups at a retreat we conducted in the seminar hall.

Most owners of an events business do not do this much, however! Lesson Two of a new course we have created called “Event – Full Business” shows how to start small and gradually build a larger events business (if that is your desire) as we have done.

We have conducted events as small as two delegates and some with over 400 so…

we know the events business inside and out… large and small. Here Merri and I are speaking to over 400 + people in Quito, Ecuador.

There are innumerable fringe benefits to an events business. For example almost all of our global travel has been tax deductible for all these years.

The pay has certainly not been bad either. As you’ll see below, one time we earned $142,260 in three days. In another instance we earned over $135,000 in two days. Once our earnings exceeded $200,000 in just three days.

Yet the income has been a small part of this adventure. The expanded horizons… the people we have met… the adventures we have shared… the tens of thousands of delegates we have enjoyed and hopefully helped…. the poor we have served… the freedom we have felt… to be able to go where we desire and come home, when we desire, with more than when we left.

These facts have dramatically enriched our lives….and we hope others.

Now we would like to help improve your lifestyle as well… if… earning with a seminar, tour events business appeals to you.

We have conducted seminars or events or spoken at them in… (alphabetical order) Australia, Bahamas, Belgium, Belize, Canada, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, England, Ecuador, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary (before the Iron Curtain came down), Indonesia, Isle of Man, Jamaica, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Panama, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Scotland, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand and at one time or another most of the United States and more.

There is a possibility that Merri and I know more about conducting events than 99.9% of the people in the world and because so many have asked… we have finally decided to provide an online correspondence course on how to create your own seminar, tour or events business.

We call this brand new emailed correspondence course: “Event – Full Business”.

We have completed 17 lessons and to give you a better idea about “Event – Full Business”. The Introduction Lesson is below.

I am ready to send you the Intro and Lesson #1 of “Event – Full Business” and am ready to accept your enrollment of students in our beta program.

See how to benefit from this first stage in our course development after you have studied this introduction.

A white water symphony… harmonized in crushed octaves. A melody amplified by nature’s power and white water sound conducted in the fresh air amphitheater that is Niagara Falls.

Merri and I walked arm and arm along the Canadian side of the falls…overwhelmed by its strength and its spectacular beauty. We had driven from our home in North Carolina to conduct an International Investing and Business Conference… one of the largest of our own seminars that we had ever conducted…380 people.

We arrived a day early… took a suite with a large red garden tub… soaked after the long journey and then enjoyed the wonder of this natural phenomenon…Niagara Falls.

This was the day to enjoy because the next three we would be busy, very busy… with stress-of course. Marketing had shot past our expectations and this was a large crowd. We would work hard yet we would also earn approximately $142,260 for three days work. Actually more. You’ll see why below.

We have earned in many ways since then… until now… 24 + years later.

This morning a reader enrolled in our 2011 International Club allowing him to attend all the seminars we’ll conduct for the next year.

He wrote: “Hi Merri. I am looking forward to meeting you both again. Had met in Niagara in the 1980s. Thanks.”

Obviously, something we did for this client 25 years ago brought this extra business to us now.

This fact stimulated me to get on with this course which I have been outlining for some time. A seminar, conference, tour business not only creates unusual profit opportunity now… but when a seminar business is properly run, it can create income for a lifetime!

This course shows how Merri I and have created riches and a lifestyle beyond our wildest imagination and shares steps you can take to create a profitable and fun business conducting seminars, workshops conferences and tours wherever and whenever you like. (Or perhaps you want to conduct seminars online or live or with a video sent through the internet.)

When it comes to conducting seminars, courses and tours, there are few people with more experience than Merri and me. Over 43 years we have organized, marketed and conducted thousands of tours for tens of thousands of people in dozens and dozens of countries (even behind the Iron Curtain).

This course shares how we have done this… what we did right… what we did wrong… how you can get started and what you can do much better than we have.

Here are the initial lessons in an outlined that I am writing.

#1: How to earn millions from seminars, courses and tours. See how we have earned as much as $200,000 for three days’ work. (Once $135,000 in two days.)

#2: How to build a seminar business. See the one day Washington-Atlanta-San Francisco system that helped our courses evolve and how to use this approach to help your teaching grow.

#3: When and when not to use other speakers. Seminars for speakers… a way to get it all out as your bank accounts gets it all in.

#4: How to use other speakers. Gain the key to the room and the people within. Why the golden pen is mightier than a glib tongue, the sword and the overloaded brain.

#5: Dealing with hotels/locations. Why the marketing does not talk to catering who will not communicate with accounting and the mess this could mean for you. How to choose… arrange and survive the hotel. Forget the $11,314 coffee bill… for swill.

#6: Scheduling seminars. Magic dates and times for marketing… how far in advance to market and seminar death dates to avoid.

#7: Creating a back end business. How Merri made $12,936 dollars at a seminar in 37 minutes by just standing still.

#8: Three types of courses… delegate driven… speaker driven… third party driven.

#9: The importance of strategic partnerships for added wealth.

#10: How to market seminars, courses & tours.

#11: List building.

#12: Alternative seminar and course location options.

#13: The benefits of both big seminars and small courses.

#14: How to survive the dreaded problems: What to do when enrollments are low. Handling the heckler, the takeover and the cell phone. When the hotel fails. Surviving speaker no shows and all of those types of things!

#15: How to enhance your other businesses with seminars.

We welcome you to “Event – Full Business”.

We’ll be doing all we can to help you create your riches and a lifestyle beyond your wildest dreams with an events business so your life and income can be filled by events and event full!

The first lesson will look at seminars, workshops conferences, exhibitions,tours, various events, how they differ and their strengths and weaknesses so you can begin to zero in on what would be best for you.

This is the introduction. We invite you to become a subscriber to this new online correspondence course, “Event – Full Business”.

We’ll send you the first lessons immediately and each lesson as it is completed. Plus we’ll ask for your input.

Never Ending Story – Save Next Year

The world is changing at an ever faster pace, so no course on business remains current for long. Our events business evolves every year. Consequently our courses never end… they evolve with our business.

Throughout the year we update, rewrite and expand our courses… adding new tips and share real time what we have learned and what we are still learning. We show the changes we are making… how and why… in our business through the year.

This continual update is like an Alumni Club. Imagine attending Harvard. After graduation you stay in touch with your fellow students. You share. You help one another. You network and stay up to date. Our online business courses work in the same way so we… all our subscribers… and you, help the courses evolve and keep pace with new ideas, new technology, innovation and changes in the market place.

So you gain more than just savings as a beta subscriber. The extra added benefit is that you help direct the creation of the course and make it more useful from the very beginning.

Then year after year… as long as you like… you stay in touch with us, our webmaster and with the other subscribers from around the world though a special password protected site.

The first 17 lessons above are set and will be sent regularly. Your questions, comments, actions, successes and failures will help expand and direct this course over the next year.